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Henry’s Midway Update

Never worked on an open-source project before, it has proven to be challenging for me to run different scripts and commands in an open-source environment. It has been a huge learning curve for me to adjust to open-source programs when I was babied all these years by GUI applications and Windows. Although we are half-way through the term, we still have a lot of development work to do. The setup of the environment took awhile as there are so many configurations that are required for this project. Yet, it was worthwhile as I’ve learned a lot from creating environment variables to running scripts on maven, and then configuring build path in installing SVN for file sharing in Eclipse. Setting up and running maven, GeoTools and GeoServer were both challenging and time-consuming as making a tiny mistake would require hours of work to fix. Yet, I have no regrets or concerns because I have learned a lot through this process.

At the moment, we are in the progress of connecting to the Ingres database server, where we will be running our testing. Once that is set up, the remaining tasks will be mostly development, which should not be too difficult. I had not anticipated setting up the environment can be so difficult and time-consuming. Nevertheless, Andrew, other members in the team and the open-source community have been very helpful. In the Ingres team, we are assigned to different mailing lists where important information is communicated across. There is also documentation regarding geospatial data that we need to read and understand for our development. Thus, considerable time is spent on reading and catching up each week. I had spent around 8-10 hours each week on reading mailing lists, catching up, and providing my input to the project. It is longer than I anticipated, but it is worthwhile as it gives me an idea of what it’s like working in the industry.

Although impediments slowed us down, I feel that we can make up for it now that we have much of our set up completed. Much of the remaining tasks are development, which I am comfortable with. I learned that communication is very important especially when all of us are scattered across Canada. As long as I ask questions, I will always get the help I need. Weekly meeting and status updates are very helpful in sharing our knowledge and findings. In the time we have left, I feel that as long as we maintain our teamwork and collaboration, we will be able to achieve our goals and help connect GeoTools to the Ingres database.